Excluding files from git-diff

Question

I am tracking a project with git. There are some Xcode project files in the working copy that I want to keep tracking, but do not want to see in diffs, because there are always dozens of changed lines that I am never interested in. Is there a simple way to have git-diff skip these files? I’ve tried to set up a custom “silent” diff tool:

 $ cat .gitattributes  Project.xcodeproj/* diff=nodiff  $ cat ~/.gitconfig  [diff "nodiff"]     command = /bin/true 

But:

 $ git diff external diff died, stopping at Project.xcodeproj/zoul.mode1v3. 

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The problem is that /bin/true will return immediately without reading its input. git diff therefore thinks, quite reasonably, that it has died prematurely.

What you really want to do is to unset the diff attribute, not set it to a bogus command. Try this in your .gitattributes:

Project.xcodeproj/* -diff 

Answer 2

You may use an alias in your .git/config

[alias]         mydiff = !git diff | filterdiff -x "*/Project.xcodeproj/*" 

You need filterdiff (from patchutils) for this trick.

sudo apt-get install patchutils 

Still the diff isn't perfect, it leaves some garbage :

yannick@yannick-desktop:~/git-filter-test$ git mydiff diff --git a/Project.xcodeproj/dummy.txt b/Project.xcodeproj/dummy.txt index 3e1f9e6..89dfed9 100644 diff --git a/dummy2.txt b/dummy2.txt index 91966ce..d9588a9 100644 --- a/titi.txt +++ b/titi.txt @@ -1,3 +1,3 @@  aaaaaaaaaa -bbbbbbbbb  cccccc +ddd